East of Suez, West of Charing Cross Road by John Lawton from Agents of Treachery - commended Homework by Phil Lovesey from The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime Vol 8 - WINNERThe Dead Club by Michael Palmer & Daniel Palmer from First Thrills - third prize

21 July 2011

The innocent might have thought phone hacking was the preserve of our official army of spooks but this week’s news developments prove otherwise and the lay out the consequences as they mushroom by the day. Profumo, Watergate, Enron: is the UK facing a weave of these in the biggest scandal and threat to the fabric of our establishment right now? Fed up of reading about it? Then it might be time to try some fiction.

Former MI5 Director General Stella Rimington and now thriller author with her Liz Carlyle series has moved to a new publisher – Bloomsbury – has a new book out, Rip Tide and a new website to boot. On the website you can even find a sample from Rip Tide in the ‘Advance Intelligence’ file. Below, she talks about her new novel.

Sometimes, fiction is more comforting than reality because you know it’s fiction…

20 July 2011

If you are travelling in the UK at the moment, you might want to pop into your station’s/airport’s WHSmith travel outlet to see what they have on offer in their books section. There you should find two novels from author Jake Needham in a promotion: The Ambassador’s Wife and The Big Mango.

To date, you may not have heard of Jake Needham and here’s why. Born in America where he qualified as a lawyer, Needham has practised law and lived in Asia for more than thirty years. That’s where his novels are set and that’s where his publisher, Marshall Cavendish is based. However, since July 15, Marshall Cavendish has made these novels available in the UK.

I loved it that man in charge of a Soho Mexican food outlet was a South African. And the food. Oh dear. It just doesn’t look appealing does it? What’s the black stuff?

Susan: ‘… and even though we had some problems before on the previous task, all the air’s been cleared…’ Not according to Natasha’s face, no.

Susan eats in a lot of Mexican restaurants. So I have to ask: where’s the originality then Susan?

It could have been easy partnership between Tom and Helen but Helen soon asserted herself and made it clear who was in charge didn’t she? A touch of control freakery in evidence there.

And now for a big ‘shhh’. We should only whisper about the lack of knowledge of history in evidence when it came to branding British food. Tom and Helen seemed to think that Christopher Columbus was British and, having discovered the potato, brought it to these islands. I’d love to ask them where cherry genoa cake was first spotted and by whom.

Helen thought the pie and mash needed feminising by making smaller pies for the ladies. That’s a higher proportion of the junk stuff (fatty pastry) in the smaller model, Helen! But sales seemed to go well…

Jim thought it was 'another time for me to shine' but just escaped the taxi in the end.

We were told on You’re Fired that Natasha had been tired. But she looked like someone who lost all interest when she didn’t get her own way in that final team of three.

And who will be the winner? We will all find out tonight. The final is on BBC1 at 9pm, immediately followed by a Dara O’Briain analysis.

I really would not be surprised if Helen wins tonight and MyPy hits the street within a year. But without the Columbus mash.

Way too late. And after all those smiling faces in pictures. It makes it look like squeezing out an awkwardly placed belligerent blackhead is easier. Could News Corp be this millennium’s Ratner? Is anyone capable of believing that blind eyes missed all this? And again, British MPs do not look clean at all. It is time the UK revisited the concept of shame to be able to re-establish some decent ethics.

15 July 2011

It’s that time of the year again. By next weekend the cows – as well as Charles and Camilla – will have vacated Harrogate and the Great Yorkshire Show will give way to the annual crime writing festival, now in its ninth year. We’ve had, and are still having, plenty of lottery rollovers so it’s time to offer up a competition taking inspiration from both. Thanks to those lovely people at both Faber & Faber and Pan Macmillan I have two sets of prizes to offer you from two outstanding crime authors and you can enter for both. I am particularly pleased with these prizes as both authors have pushed boundaries with their work.

12 July 2011

[Second edition reprinted by Aber Publishing in 2011, first published in 2007 by Studymates.]

Without doubt, crime fiction is popular and commercially successful. Many enjoy reading it and many harbour ambitions to write it. If you are starting out, it’s worth taking a look at this guidance from Janet Laurence which covers the necessary basic building blocks from the writing to the selling of your completed manuscript. Writing Crime Fiction’s chapters include areas such as plotting, settings, characterisation and motivation, dialogue, narrative style, whether or not to use outlines, specialist knowledge, research, pace, opening hooks and denouements. Carefully, Laurence illustrates her points with examples from her own work and from those of other crime authors, as well as dropping in quotes of guidance and observation from UK names that you will recognise. She also sets exercises to get the juices flowing. So if you can’t afford Faber Academy or the new Guardian Masterclasses, fear not. You can bounce around some ideas using this book and learn a few things along the way. To her credit, Laurence also makes it very clear that this is a business and any writer with hopes of being published needs to be aware of what that means.

But there’s more. You can also assess the business by looking at the content of the book from another angle where this book was first published a mere four years ago. Those names I mentioned are the first key. Ask yourself where they are today? Are the big names still big names and if not, why not? If yes, what is responsible for their career trajectory? If not, who has replaced them? What makes success and what makes enduring success? Secondly, which names were at early stages of their careers and where are they now? Investigate that also.

Making the writing pay is more than just the writing, so to get the bigger picture take a look at this book.

Janet Laurence has written two series of crime novels: the Darina Lisle culinary mysteries and three Canaletto mysteries. She has run a number of writing workshops, including ones for the Arvon Foundation and the Cheltenham Spring Festival. She has also been a Visiting Fellow/Writer in Residence three times at Jane Franklin Hall College, part of the University of Tasmania.